Thursday, February 26, 2009

"Critics are eating up everything about Amazon's Kindle 2 e-book reader except its $359 price tag. But if you think that's expensive, take a look behind the Kindle at E Ink, the Cambridge, MA, company that has spent $150 million since 1997 developing the electronic paper display that is the Kindle's coolest feature. In the company's first interview since the Kindle 2 came out, E Ink CEO Russ Wilcox says it took far longer than expected to make the microcapsule-based e-paper film not only legible, but durable and manufacturable. Now that the Kindle 2 is finally getting readers to take e-books seriously, however, Wilcox says he sees a profitable future in which many book, magazine, and newspaper publishers will turn to e-paper, if only to save money on printing and delivery. (Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could save more than $300 million a year by shutting down its presses and buying every subscriber a Kindle). 'What we've got here is a technology that could be saving the world $80 billion a year,' Wilcox says."

The electronic paper revolution is coming very soon. The Kindle 2 is just the beginning. The next couple of generations of e-book readers will improve exponentially as they come out over the next several years. Pulp-based paper won't go away, but it will soon no longer be the primary medium by which news, entertainment, and other literature are conveyed.

The technology is here. It's just a matter of getting the engineering kinks worked out. And that won't take more than a few more years--especially since there's going to be such a big demand for these readers as print-based publications continue to fold because they are no longer able to fund themselves in this new information age.

Hearst hopes its reader can do for periodicals what Amazon's Kindle is doing for books. "We are keenly interested in this, and expect these devices will be a big part of our future," says Kenneth Bronfin, who heads Hearst's interactive media group.